Fred Ho & The Saxophone Liberation Front - Snake-Eaters (2011) {Mutable-Big Red Media 002}

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Fred Ho & The Saxophone Liberation Front - Snake-Eaters (2011) {Mutable-Big Red Media 002}

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Fred Ho & The Saxophone Liberation Front - Snake-Eaters (2011) {Mutable-Big Red Media 002}
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© 2011 Mutable Music / Big Red Media | 002
Jazz / Avant-Garde Jazz / Experimental / Modern Creative / Saxophone

Snake-Eaters debuts Fred Ho's Saxophone Liberation Front, featuring composer Ho on baritone saxophone and Hafez Modirzadeh (soprano), Bobby Zankel (alto) and Salim Washington (tenor).

Darker than Blue, inspired by Curtis Mayfield's song, We the People Who are Darker than Blue, employs shifting meters (including a blues section in 11/8 and 11.5 /8), 12-tone serialism, compound meter ostinati, and Lydian chromatic approaches to orchestration.

Ho's Yellow Power, Yellow Soul Suite coincides with the soon-to-be publication of the Drs. Roger Buckley and Tamara Roberts' festschrift by the same title, and includes the previously recorded "Fishing Song of the East China Sea" (originally a flute trio with bass violin on the out-of-print recording by Fred Ho and the Asian American Art Ensemble, Bamboo that Snaps Back; and the now-defunct Brooklyn Sax Quartet recording The Far Side of Here), as well as Afro-Asian adaptations of other Asian folk songs.

Jeet Kune Do (The Way of the Intercepting Fist) is an homage to one of Asian America's greatest innovators, martial artist-actor-philosopher-teacher Bruce Lee. Lalo Schifrin-esque tropes from the epic film, Enter: The Dragon, combine with the élan of Stan Getz-ian bossa nova and cool styles, and epitomize the Zen-like philosophy and pugilism of Bruce Lee: the art of fighting without fighting; or as Ho has stated: the point of technique is to have no technique (and by inference, be completely intuitive, improvisational and in the moment).

Reflections (Upon Reflections!), in a sonata-like form of Exposition upon Monk's classic tune, an extended Development that is a significant departure from a chord-changes based tune, and a brief Recapitulation. Misty-ificaton is a "what-if" supposition: What if the DNA of Errol Garner's Misty was mixed with the genes of Rob Zombie's films? Frightening? Horrifying? Or, Hyperbolized? Steroidal balladry?

During the international campaign to oppose the celebration of the Columbus quincentennial, in which indigenous peoples joined with anti-imperialist and pro-social justice forces worldwide, including a vast array of artists, the old Fred Ho composed the Beyond Columbus and Capitalism suite for the Rova Saxophone Quartet, which would during the 1990s lead to the formation of the Brooklyn Sax Quartet when Ho was asked to do numerous benefit concerts throughout New York City

Reflections (Redux and Prefigurative) has Ho playing Thelonius Monk's melody in the very bottom register of his low-A horn while voicing the accompanying saxes down-upwards, and ending with a collective bluesy-gospel romp towards an ending chord of precursory possibilities.

Finally, the extraordinary duet by Fred Ho and Persian-American vocalist Haleh Abghari, Dear Reader, based upon a James Tate poem, which was commissioned in 2006 by the Guggenheim Museum Works and Process series.

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Fred Ho & The Saxophone Liberation Front - Snake-Eaters (2011) {Mutable-Big Red Media 002}

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One needn't know Fred Ho's long musical/political/personal public saga to enjoy and appreciate this CD's sound and feel, but it sure does help.

Billed as the "debut of Fred Ho's Saxophone Liberation Front," its disciplined-riotous sound suggests that he's not only still going after a long and difficult bout with cancer (detailed on his blog and published as Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the Cellular Level, but was still going strong beyond that account. Supporting that claim is a spate of recordings released during the most recent stage of that up-and-down battle, since 2010–several, like this one, presenting new work and reviving/reprising earlier work in new contexts, including that of the battle's impact on the music (in liner notes; such reference is muted here to passing mentions of "The New Fred Ho, b. August 5, 2006," the date of his diagnosis). As ever, this music is informed by and enlisted against Ho's foes: the biological disease itself, yes, but even more so the cultural and political powers he sees contributing to more than helping to heal it and the usual host of the more social ills of his concern. Knowing all that helps you hear the life-or-death stakes these tracks are imbued with.

"Snake Eaters" refers to a military's elite group of assassins trained specifically to take out (eat) their special-op counterparts in their enemy's forces. "Beyond Columbus and Capitalism" names that general enemy; it is a suite born as a 1992 commission by the Rova Saxophone Quartet in solidarity with an international campaign to oppose the Columbus quincentennial then. Its four tracks are titled to critique post-Columbian history for its four horsemen of gold-lust, syphilitic sex-lust, excessive lust for red meat, and the capitalist system enabling them all.
It also helps to know some history of Ho's instrument, for its resonance with his work's longstanding militant aspects. Herr Adolphe Sax's 1846 invention of it brought the formerly more soft-spoken woodwind family into the martial groups of brass and drums that led to American jazz. Those roots morphed into the mellower sound of the big-band sax section also informing Ho's work, especially here in pieces such as "Jeet Kune Do: The Way of the Intercepting Fist" (for Bruce Lee; think Lalo Schifrin), two different arrangements of Thelonious Monk's classic "Reflections," and an arrangement/variation of Erroll Garner's "Misty."

The most current incarnation of that tradition, of course, is the one contemporary with Ho's own post-1960s history. Anthony Braxton recorded with the first such group in 1974, which became the World Saxophone Quartet when David Murray replaced him in it. After abovementioned commission for Rova, Ho founded his own Brooklyn Saxophone Quartet, with David Bindman, Sam Furnace, and Chris Jonas. All, like this one, are associated with the post-Black Power aesthetic that affirmed the instrument's individual and collective sound in the 20th century and beyond as preeminently and victoriously African American.

That said, Ho's place in that history is more specifically Afro-Asian, itself a movement and aesthetic of this period that he has helped forge and further in all his work as musician and author of several books and articles. This CD's "Yellow Power, Yellow Soul Suite" comprises four tracks that fall into that terrain, based on traditional Japanese, Korean, and Chinese folk and martial songs. As blues and jazz generally deliver an African-inflected American sound, this part of Ho's work (echoed on many other recordings) lays out the more Asian inflections of the same American vocabulary.
Finally, it helps to be a bit of saxophone aficionado and a student of music theory, because Arthur Song's liner notes let you in on the details of the players' gear and the musical details of meter, form, and system framing the material. That's because Fred Ho is a musician's musician, an American master, and what some Asian culture's might call a Living Treasure. It helps to know that.

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Fred Ho & The Saxophone Liberation Front - Snake-Eaters (2011) {Mutable-Big Red Media 002}

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Fred Ho & The Saxophone Liberation Front - Snake-Eaters (2011) {Mutable-Big Red Media 002}

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Fred Ho & The Saxophone Liberation Front - Snake-Eaters (2011) {Mutable-Big Red Media 002}

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